I’m no hacking ninja, so when I tried to crack my iPhone in OS X and Windows, I ran into a bit of trouble. I performed these steps using Windows Vista on a standard PC and the worked after two restores. I cannot vouch for the value or accuracy of these steps but worse comes to worse you restore to factory settings using iTunes and start over. You could brick your iPhone — be warned.
This process assumes you have not hacked your phone in the past. If you have, installing the app is as simple as using iBrickr or the command line iphoneinterface. If you have not, please try this. I’m refining these steps as I get user feedback, but they worked for me.
1. Download and install iTunes.
2. Download and open iBrickr. This will allow you to Jailbreak your iPhone and begin to install applications onto it.
First, a brief word on the Jailbreak process. This is the process that allows you to access your iPhone. Under OSX, this is quite simple. Under Windows, it’s a bit more complicated.
The process for Jailbreaking your phone is made considerably easier thanks to iBrickr. Unzip the program and find the folder on your desktop or elsewhere.
3. Plug in your iPhone and “restore” it by clicking the restore button. This will download the firmware iBrickr needs to operate on. This is the best way to do it. It will place the files into a directory iBrickr can easily find. Remove the iPhone before the restore process completed to download the software.
4. Run iBrickr from the folder you unzipped. This folder also contains iPhoneInterface, a command line utitlity that lets you communicate with the iPhone using standard Unix commands.
Begin the Jailbreak process.
5. Follow the instructions for iASign, first uploading the PEM file, then generating your plist file, and then activating the phone from the command line. There are three parts to the activation. First is the iPhoneActivation.pem file which “prepares” the phone for activation. Then there is a plist file that you automatically generate, using the preceding link, to convince the iPhone it’s ready to rock. Then you use iActivate to match the public and private keys and activate the phone. This is the only part that requires some command line smarts and it’s all explained on the iASign page. You download an application from that page and run it to activate the phone.
iASign actually generates an EXE file that will perform this process for you. I could tell you how to get the actual iASign executable, but it looks like you have to compile it to use it so let’s avoid that.
Activate the phone.
5. Unplug the iPhone. We don’t want anything getting in the way of the SimFree.app.
6. Upload the SimFree.app using iBrickr.
7. Run the SimFree.app on the iPhone. Be ABSOLUTELY SURE the phone is completely charged. In fact:
PLEASE ENSURE YOUR PHONE IS FULLY CHARGED AND YOUR “Auto-Lock” SETTING (in Settings/General) is set to NEVER for the duration of the unlock process. You may change it back once the application is finished.
Feel free to delete it later.
8. Reactivate the phone using iASign.
9. Your iPhone is unlocked and activated. If you change SIM cards you must reactivate the phone using step 7.
